She has earned the right to reminisce about the feminist filmmovement because she has "been there"...but has not camped permanently in any chic or safe spot....a narrative like Rich's reveals the hard work, partnerships, advocacies and hours-of-falling apart behind ...moments of pulling together.
—Women's Review of Books
Chick Flicks is a model of politically rooted, socially conscious, intellectually challenging—but not intellectually alienating—cultural criticism. -- San Francisco Bay Guardian
A longtime film curator and critic (for, most notably, The Village Voice
and Sight and Sound), [Rich] is in the rare position of having freely
crossed usually impermeable boundaries: between mainstream filmmaking and
the avant garde, between the academic and the popular press, between
lesbian and heterosexual feminists. She seems to have known everybody in
the past 25 years who has ever written about, made or professed a serious
interest in film. That free-ranging sensibility makes Rich an eminently
reasonable guide through this contested ground. She gives all sides their
due; her arguments painstakingly avoid the kind of rigid binary thinking
that, for example, made the pornography debates so maddeningly irrelevant
to most women’s lives. . . . [S]he loves film and believes in its power to
change lives-and in her own power to educate audiences about the films she
loves.
Chick Flicks has far more to offer than a backstage glimpse of feminist politics. First, Rich’s essays provide a lively chronicle of independent women filmmakers as well as critical assessments of their work. I can imagine this collection as a useful textbook in a course on women and cinema, but also as a readable narrative for film lovers who would like to know about a marginalized but significant history. . . . A major strength of this collection is its scope. Although her topic is cinema, Rich’s larger concern is women as artists and subjects of visual media. . . .
Rich’s observations about the politics of feminist scholarship go far
beyond the topic of film studies. . . . Chick Flicks, with its multiple
contexts and locations, Sundance to Cuba to Edinburgh, demonstrates how
widely spaces of theory can be imagined and how inclusive its visions can
be.”-
[Rich] frames her essays and reviews with prologues that define the
cultural milieu into which each piece was delivered. The pleasure of Chick
Flicks lies in these prologues; here Rich is at her best, and the reader is
invited to watch as she looks back to consider herself as the writer and
thinker she was versus the writer and thinker she is now.
B. Ruby Rich’s Chick Flicks: Theories and Memories of the Feminist Film
Movement is a necessary, passionate and beautifully written call to arms
for the feminist film community to remember that ideas are not imbedded
exclusively within our lonely, computer-shackled selves, but demand
collective action to imagine a better future. It is without question one of
the most significant film books published in the past year, with brilliant
deconstructions of legendary feminist films and searing exposés of the
events and people who formed the feminist film movement. The importance of
this book resides in how it deftly wrenches all of us from the thinking
that feminist film theory represents merely a theoretical paradigm, and
arcane academic lingo or a bourgeois individual pursuit for tenure and
publication. Rich reminds us that feminist film is ‘a discipline that began
as a movement’ where ‘the present landscape of feminism and film has been
deprived of its own history, substituting a canon of texts for a set of
lived experiences.’ . . . In the short time since its publication last
fall, Chick Flicks has emerged as an essential text for feminist film
activists. It is a rare and momentous book that forces its readers to join
something larger than their individual selves. Chick Flicks delivers a
feminist film culture of debates, arguments and controversies; a place
where cultural practice and theoretical analyses matter, where the stakes
are high and where every utterance, every essay, every film wages war
against patriarchy and inaction. Rich has managed to create a book of
urgency and action, a text that challenges readers to continue the debates,
find new fissures, devour new films and videos, cross borders and summon
the courage to act collectively. Chick Flicks, then, is not simply a tome
of the collected works of one of the fiercest minds of feminist film. It
is, in the end, a lexicon for the new vernaculars of the future, a feminist
film manual for the new millennium.
Rich is a gifted writer, and her book is an enticing mix of analysis, memoir, history, and dish structured as an anthology of articles published over the last quarter-century and interspersed with updating commentaries.
. . . Best of all, Chick Flicks is a highly readable, informal
‘you-are-there’ history of one of the byways of the feminist movement.
This extraordinary collection of essays alternates between chronicling the
author’s 30 years in feminist film and exploring cinematic theory. B. Ruby
Rich, cultural critic extraordinaire, tries her nonsequential chapters
together as a ‘cinefeminism’ manifesto. Go with Rich to Cuba to understand
the impact of the late director Sarah Gomez (One Way or Another); to
Belgium in 1974 for the stunning Knokke-Heist EXPMNTL Film Festival; and to
Michigan to learn about Adrienne Rich’s ‘euphoric’ fans and the beginnings
of lesbian cinema. Whatever you do , don’t go without her. A.” -Girlfriends
“Advocate columnist B. Ruby Rich re-creates the days when feminism met film
and hatched a new movement whose sexiness and cool are now only dimly
remembered. Samples of her own film writings from the ‘70s and ‘80s
alternate with juicy dish on the doings (in and out of bed) of a generation
of wild women and their pals.
In alternating this collection of articles from the 70s and 80s with newer
reflective and autobiographical passages, Rich seeks to add the story of
her own life to the women’s stories told in the films she explicates. More
importantly, she provides a context for her criticism. . . . [S]he often
dishes great gossip, and anything that makes me laugh out loud more than
once deserves a position on my bookshelf. . . .Ultimately Rich’s book is a
moving argument for a newly emerging cinema, a feminist one made largely
with women spectators in mind, one that attempts to present the full
personal and social contexts that affect their lives
Like movies? Do you especially like strong feminist movie critique interspersed with journalistic chronicle, a dash of memoir, and heavy on cultural historical perspective? You’ll want to make sure, then, to carry Chick Flicks: Theories and Memories of the Feminist Film Movement by B.
Ruby Rich. Rich is a journalist whose film commentaries are broadcast on
NPR. This collection of essays written in accessible, matter-of-fact style
captures the growth, history, and ‘gossip’ of feminist film.
[Rich’s] essays are lucid and undogmatic, albeit impassioned; and her
reflections-whether on her own lesbianism or on the course of feminist
theory and practice-are highly readable and interesting . . . . [T]his is
a valuable and interesting work for all undergraduate, graduate, and
research film collections.
Passionate about film and an inspired programmer who has written for such
varied publications as Elle, The Village Voice, and Sight and Sound, Rich
has crafted a fascinating history by innovatively sandwiching a
chronological selection of her writings (some of them programme notes, some
more formal pieces) with new, context-filling recollections. The unashamed
use of autobiography might be sniffed at by more academic readers, but it
seems entirely justified here given the personal-is-political spirit of the
age covered. Moreover, the almost gossipy tone vividly lights up a period
when many really imagined film might overthrow the social order. Lecturers
might find that a spoonful of Rich’s honeyed prose will help doses of
difficult films (for example Marleen Gorris’ A Question of Silence or
Yvonne Rainer’s work) slip down a treat.
Memoir and manifesto, Rich’s incisive collection chronicles how she found
it at the movies: ‘It’ being self, feminism, and the contours of a feminine
aesthetic and politics. With essays on filmmakers Leni Riefenstahl and
Leontine Sagan and her considerations of actress Julie Christie and
director Chantal Akerman, Chick Flicks connects filmgoing to feminism to
fortitude.
